Satire in 1947, reality today

THE CURRENT ABSURD political culture led me over the week end to revisit the 1947 film The Senator Was Indiscreet, courtesy of the Akron-Summit County Public Library. In the irreverent hands of director George S. Kaufman, Sen. Mel Ashton (William Powell) is a boob who presents himself on a campaign-style whistle stop as a non-presidential candidate. (Sound familiar these days?) He is against inflation as well as deflation, but supports "flation". The fanciful plot satirically turns on a diary that he has kept for many years as an insider's story that is so politically delicious that it lures others to steal it. The diary is published and the senator heads to a South Seas Island to serve as its top banana. Naturally, it is all for laughs.

There is much here to remind us of today's laughable antics of a certain presidential field in our midst. Even a master humorist like Kaufman couldn't come up with some of the current lunacy:

As the candidates' words arrived on my computer and TV, here's what they wanted you to know:

Herman Cain insists on loyalty oaths by American Muslims.

Newt Gingrich's entire campaign staff resigns, or as Bill Maher described it: "His staff fired him." (And to anyone who suggested that I was off the reservation in my past references to Gingrich as Crazy Guggenheim , I can only ask, "Would you repeat that, please?

Rick Santorum, the GOP herd's theocrat-in-chief, says on Meet the Press that there are no circumstances in which abortions would be OK, even if the mother's (not the father's, of course) life were endangered.

Does anybody know where these boobs keep their diaries?